sydney morning herald article

NIPLATS'S executive director, Richard Wolanski, has deemed his company's exploration program a "fabulous success" after its shares have risen seven-fold since listing on the stock exchange just six weeks ago.

While hunting for platinum and palladium in Western Australia's Kimberley, NiPlats made a large vanadium discovery which has pushed its shares from a 20c listing price to a closing of $1.40 on Friday, 20c higher on the day.

All 27 drilling holes done between May and September have hit vanadium, a steel-making material, over an area 3.5 kilometres by 1.5 kilometres.

"The initial results are extremely promising," Mr Wolanski said. "All had significant intersections of vanadium - enough that we believe we will be able to generate a resource out of those intersections."

The grades at NiPlats's Hart dolerite intrusion range from 0.29 per cent to 0.39 per cent vanadium, which is lower than the 0.47 per cent resource at the old Windimurra mine owned by Precious Metals Australia. But given the large mineralised zone, it could potentially host more vanadium than Windimurra.

Despite NiPlats's success with vanadium, Mr Wolanski said the company remains more focused on finding platinum and palladium, since those metals sell for much higher prices.

A drilling program last year discovered thin zones of platinum group metals in the region. Mr Wolanski said NiPlats's geologists believed the geophysical characteristics of the Hart intrusion were similar to those in the world's most productive platinum province - South Africa's Bushveld.

"In the Bushveld in South Africa, vanadium is associated with the platinum," Mr Wolanski said. "Our focus remains squarely on searching for the platinum and palladium. The vanadium, obviously if it becomes commercially viable, we'll make a project of that too."

He said NiPlats's spectacular share price gains could partly be attributed to the scarcity of stock. The director Keith Liddell's Mineral Securities owns 44 per cent and other top 50 shareholders had increased their holdings in the last few weeks.